The Blight of Hindustan

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

An egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization for at least a thousand years, when Buddhism began losing ground in South Asia. The dominant Hindu sensibility has long held that all men are created unequal, constituting not one but many moral communities, and possess varying natural rights and duties. The anthropologist Louis Dumont saw hierarchy as so central to Indian lives, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he titled his 1966 treatise on Indian society, Homo Hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from?

The Origins of Caste

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—they were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas (‘color’): the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four divisions appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda (but not the word ‘varna’), and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society. ‘According to the Mahabharata, the "colors" associated with the four [varnas] were white, red, yellow and black; they sound more like symbolic shades meted out by those category-conscious brahmanical minds than skin pigments.’[1]

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy—interwoven as it was with its cosmology, gods, and rituals—turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The main organizing principle of this hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those associated with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahmanical ‘knowledge’.

As this new social order spread in the first millennium BCE, it encountered more settled peoples as well as forest dwelling clans. Whether by force, persuasion, or mutual advantage, more groups were brought into its fold. They too found themselves plugged into its hierarchy, perhaps loosely at first, and gradually gave up their more egalitarian ways. In doing so, they used the same principle of relative ‘purity’ to make jati and varna decisions for various units within their own societies, and by extension, to divide power and resources.[2] To sweeten the deal, the Vedic social order became flexible enough to absorb indigenous gods into its ever-growing pantheon—including perhaps even gods like Shiva and Krishna—giving rise to a syncretic religious culture. In some cases, a whole endogamous tribe could become one jati, often regarded as outcastes. The Laws of Manu, written about 2,000 years ago, mentions many such communities: the Medas, Andhras, Chunchus, and Madgus who live off ‘the slaughter of wild animals’, the Pukkasas by ‘catching and killing [animals] in holes’, etc. In time, new dietary regimes would get associated with each new jati. For instance, beef and alcohol would become taboo for those accorded a higher caste.

Many modern thinkers, including Tagore, have argued that while far from perfect, this was back then a practical way of bringing together highly diverse peoples, through which ‘men of different colors and creeds, different physical features and mental attitudes settled together side by side.’[3] In The Discovery of India, Nehru struck a stronger note of apologia: ‘Thus at a time when it was customary for the conquerors to exterminate or enslave the conquered races, caste enabled a more peaceful solution which fitted in with the growing specialization of functions.’ He saw caste as ‘necessary and desirable in its early forms, and meant to develop individuality and freedom’. Such thinkers argued that by assigning religious, political, and economic power to three different classes—the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, and the Vaishyas—the system prevented their concentration in a single dominant racial or ethnic group, thereby creating a basis for cooperation and avoiding far greater friction, open slavery, and even genocidal wars. Historian John Keay, while calling this new social order ‘systematised oppression’, added that ‘it should also be seen as an ingenious schema for harnessing the loyalties of a more numerous and possibly more skilled indigenous population.’ In recent decades, many Hindu nationalists, keen to boost Hindu self-respect and pride, have whitewashed their social history and invented a rosier one. The four varnas, they claim, were wholly meritocratic in ancient times, based on personal choice, aptitude, and conduct—i.e., one’s varna depended on individual qualities, not on the accident of birth in a household. Some even go as far as saying that it was the invading Muslims and the British who perverted the varna system into the caste system that’s with us today.

Modern genomic research has shown that endogamy became widespread about seventy generations ago, at least ‘among upper castes and Indo-European speakers’, replacing the earlier pattern of widespread admixing of extant populations. Over time the institution of caste grew rigid and restrictive, becoming, as BR Ambedkar said, not a division of labor but a division of laborers. Any mixing of castes via intermarriage came to be frowned upon and often harshly punished. Social mobility got severely curtailed and the upper castes conveniently linked one’s place in the hierarchy to karma and destiny; even their epics and mythologies helped perpetuate this social order (though it would be simplistic to read them as doing nothing more, or to not contain contradictory views). The Ramayana contains strong expressions of hierarchy, the Bhagavad Gita extols the sanctity of caste, and The Laws of Manu attempts to codify its operation, declaring a crime against a Brahmin much worse than one committed against a low-caste person.

The caste system eventually took on beliefs and social practices that have trampled on some of the most basic tenets of human dignity and inflicted untold misery, humiliation, and injustice on too many for too long. Among its worst victims are the Dalits (‘the oppressed’)—formerly ‘untouchables’—numbering one out of six Indians. Injury and prejudice are in fact so integral to the functioning of the caste system—doesn’t the extreme ‘purity’ of one caste require the extreme ‘impurity’ of another, and all that this entails?—that it’s hard to imagine today what a plausible defense of it by an insider or a cultural pluralist might look like.

How old is untouchability? Historians report a few instances of it in pre-Gupta times, some as early as 400 BCE when Panini mentions it. From around the same time, one of the Jataka Tales—which contain stories about the Buddha’s past lives—mentions the Chandala, whose mere sight sully a merchant’s daughters and a priest. The Laws of Manu also advises that the impure Chandala must live outside the village and must not look at Brahmins when the latter are eating. If a Brahmin happens to touch a Chandala, he must bathe to regain purity. Historian Romila Thapar therefore dates the appearance of untouchability to over 2,000 years ago. Ambedkar likely got it wrong when he stated that ‘Untouchability was born some time about 400 A.D.’[4] Untouchability however became a socially significant phenomenon only in the early medieval period,[5] not long after Buddhism had peaked in the Subcontinent in mid-first millennium CE. It was well established when the Persian traveler Al-Beruni visited India in early 11^th century, and saw many groups of ‘degraded outcastes’ who lived outside upper-caste villages and were ‘occupied with dirty work’.

By then, this ‘dirty work’—the cleaning of other people’s shit by hand, the disposing and skinning of dead animals, etc.—was entirely hereditary, aided by the deep internalization of one’s own ‘natural’ place in the hierarchy, and enforced by the threat of verbal, physical, economic, and other violence. By late medieval times, bonded labor and sexual exploitation of the outcastes was common too. In some regions, the feudal landlord was even entitled to spend the first night with the newlywed wives of the ‘untouchable’ men in his employ, as in the infamous system of dola.[6]

The caste system also worsened the plight of other women beyond the inequities inherent in all patriarchies. The desire to preserve upper-caste ‘purity’ created anxieties over miscegeny (intercaste breeding), including extra horror and penalties for hypogamy, where an upper-caste woman marries a lower-caste man. This demanded more stringent control over female sexuality, which then encouraged the custom of female child marriage. ‘Women’s cooperation in the system’, writes historian Uma Chakravarti, ‘was secured by various means: ideology, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges and veneration bestowed upon conforming and dependent women of the upper classes, and, finally, the use of force when required.’[7]

The Anatomy of Caste

Castes are not a feature of Hindu society alone. A de facto caste hierarchy also exists among the Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs of India—even as people converted away from Hinduism, they couldn’t abandon the caste mindset. Moreover, while caste is today most visibly associated with India, forms of it have either existed or still exist elsewhere, including in Japan (with an outcaste group, the Burakumin), Korea, Europe, Hawaii, Arabia, and Africa, some with strikingly parallel notions of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’. Dumont however pointed out that despite the presence of caste-like forms in these societies, they lacked a proper caste system, which ensures that no member of the society is beyond its classification, as in the Indian Subcontinent. And while it’s true that inherited inequalities are a part of the human story everywhere, many inequalities of caste in South Asia seem distinct in both scale and conception. Furthermore, ‘the impassable trenches of the caste system’, writes British historian Perry Anderson, created ‘truly deep impediments to collective action, even within language communities, let alone across them’. According to Anderson, 

‘Hereditary, hierarchical, occupational, striated through and through with phobias and taboos, Hindu social organisation fissured the population into some five thousand jatis, few with any uniform status or definition across the country. No other system of inequality, dividing not simply, as in most cases, noble from commoner, rich from poor, trader from farmer, learned from unlettered, but the clean from the unclean, the seeable from the unseeable, the wretched from the abject, the abject from the subhuman, has ever been so extreme, and so hard-wired with religious force into human expectation.’[8]

It’s worth noting that castes are not a feature of Hindu society alone. A de facto caste hierarchy also exists among the Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs of India. Moreover, while caste is today most visibly associated with India, forms of it have either existed or still exist elsewhere, including in Japan (with an outcaste group, the Burakumin), Korea, Europe, Hawaii, Arabia, and Africa, some with strikingly parallel notions of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’. Dumont however pointed out that despite the presence of caste-like forms in these societies, they lacked a proper caste system, which ensures that no member of the society is beyond its classification, as in the Indian Subcontinent.

Prejudice invariably feeds upon culturally constructed ideas of human difference, including of caste, race, gender, beauty, reason, civilization, and so on. In The Indians, Sudhir and Katharina Kakar point out that psychological training to associate ‘purity’ with clean and ‘pollution’ with dirty begins early on in Indian households:

For the upper-caste child, a dalit is a member of a group that is permanently and irrevocably dirty. The child’s knowledge is not anthropological or religious-textual but a knowledge-feeling that is pre-verbal and has, so to speak, entered the child’s very bones. Many a time while growing up, the child has sensed the sudden kinesthetic tension in the body of his mother, father, aunt, uncle, when a dalit has come too near. He has registered their expressions of disgust, unconsciously mimicking them in his own face and body at any threatened contact with an untouchable. Given the child’s propensity to place himself at the center of all experience, he effortlessly links the family’s disapproval and revulsion toward the untouchable to those times when he has been an ‘untouchable’ himself, that is, the times ... above all, when he has been filthily, gloriously dirty.

Regarding others as impure and dirty, and therefore subhuman, is also commonplace outside the context of caste. It is a universal trick designed to withhold empathy from and to dominate antagonistic groups, especially during ethnic conflicts. As the Kakars write,

‘Dirty nigger’ and ‘dirty Jew’ are well-known epithets in the United States. The Chinese regard Tibetans as unwashed and perpetually stinking of yak butter, while Jewish children in Israel are brought up to regard Arabs as dirty. In the Rwandan radio broadcasts inciting the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis, the latter were consistently called rats and cockroaches, creatures associated with dirt and underground sewers, vermin that needed to be exterminated.’

Many historians have criticized Dumont’s pioneering analysis of caste, accusing him of overstating the power of the Brahmins and of the ‘purity’ principle in shaping caste. They claim that norms, inter-caste relations, and social practices were more fluid and diverse than Dumont’s schema suggests, with the Brahmin not the only reference point (royalty could be more powerful, for instance, but this led scholar Gail Omvedt to raise an important question: did the secular power tussles between the royals and the Brahmins resist the ideological frame of Brahmanism itself? If not, the point about royal power may be a red herring). Today’s caste system, these historians argue, was heavily shaped by the social, administrative, and economic changes that began in early colonial times—until then, a lot of Indians ‘were still comparatively untouched by the norms of jati and varna as we now understand them.’ [9] Census classifications and differential state policies also hardened caste identities in modern times. In Castes of Mind, Nicholas B. Dirks accused Dumont of treating ‘the political and economic aspects of caste as relatively secondary and isolated.’ Dirks argued that from the late 19th century, British ethnography and resulting knowledge became a potent evolutionary force on caste—via hierarchical ranking of castes using ‘racial-types’ and anthropometry as factors among others, criminalization of entire castes, instituting caste-based regiments and the concept of ‘martial races’ in the army, ‘implementation of legal codes that made the provisions of law applicable on caste lines,’ and more. According to Dirks, ‘Caste emerged, stronger than ever, from the legacy of Orientalist forms of knowledge.’[10]

A complementary view, articulated by scholar-activist Anand Teltumbde, is that British judicial and administrative practices, seemingly based on equality before the law, ‘undermined the importance of caste.’ The institutions of the British Raj, which seeded modernity in India, created ‘an enabling environment’ for the ‘emerging anticaste ethos’, ‘opened opportunities for economic betterment, particularly for the untouchables, and allowed both untouchables and shudras access to modern education.’[11] It was only later, Teltumbde holds, that certain dubious ‘modernist policies’ of the Indian State and a harsher capitalism, while erasing ‘certain caste divisions’, gave rise to new political and economic contestations—especially between a newly ascendant shudra class of peasant landowners and landless Dalits in rural India. This ‘reinforced caste and accentuated its viciousness as never before.’ For both Dirks and Teltumbde, then, caste has been far more malleable, dynamic, and responsive to mundane (non-religious) causes than in Dumont’s portrait.

Other critics who see Dumont’s view of caste as monolithic argue that to a certain extent, social mobility has existed all along—a lower-caste group could change its way of life and move up within a generation or two, a process that has been called ‘Sanskritization’. The sociologist M. N. Srinivas has defined it as a process through which ‘a low or middle Hindu caste, or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual ideology, and way of life in the direction of a high and frequently twice-born caste.’ It might invent an ‘Aryanized’ version of its past and a link with an old royal dynasty. In late 19th century, for instance, the Yadavs of north India began claiming descent from Krishna himself. Within a generation or two, a caste could ‘rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism, and by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon. In short, it took over, as far as possible, the customs, rites, and beliefs of the Brahmins, and adoption of the Brahminic way of life.’ However, it is also easy to overstate the actual incidence of Sanskritization, for it was resisted by the gatekeepers of tradition and remained rare, more an aspirational idea in the lower rungs of the hierarchy. ‘Srinivas normalizes, even glorifies, caste and Brahmanism,’ according to Braj Ranjan Mani, author of Debrahmanising History. ‘Implicit in his theory and his overall scholarship is that caste is amazingly fluid and fair’.

Notably, Sanskritization not only didn’t challenge the caste system, it strengthened and legitimized the pursuit of what Ambedkar has called its ‘ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.’ In effect, ‘By adopting the most prestigious features of the upper castes’ ethos, the lower castes explicitly acknowledge their social inferiority.’[12] Historian Christophe Jaffrelot has observed that the incidence of Sanskritization was higher among the so-called dominant castes, a term that describes ‘peasant Shudras who have occasionally risen to power because of their hold over land and their sheer number.’ Throughout history, he adds, the dominant castes that were ‘most successful in their attempt at conquering power managed to be recognized as Kshatriyas by Brahmins who invented genealogies for them.’ For recent examples, he points to Marathas (Maharashtra), Lingayats and Vokkalingas (Karnataka), and Kammas and Reddys (Andhra Pradesh). Citing Srinivas, he writes that ‘the Kshatriya category was the most open of the caste system.’ To Jaffrelot, ‘the very existence of "dominant" castes shows that the Brahminical view of society may describe (or prescribe) an ideal-type in the Weberian sense, but not [always] the reality of power relations: swarnas [those of the top three varnas] may not [always] be at the top of the socio-political hierarchy’,[12] despite being at the top in terms of ritual status and its privileges. Even social reform movements and policies of state sometimes provoke a shift in power relations and collective identities. The Jats of north India, for instance, have opportunistically claimed to be both Kshatriya and OBC in different contexts, first under the aegis of Arya Samaj’s missionary drive to Sanskritize lower castes and then in response to positive discrimination programs initiated by the Mandal commission.

Notably, Marxist historians like Irfan Habib have argued that ‘purity’ was a rationalization for class interests and existing social exploitation, [13] and further, that the material impact of colonialism and capitalism is what turned caste into the potent force that it became in modern India. Caste endogamy and heredity were shaped, too, by its function as a provider of community and a means of preserving specialized artisan skills and knowledge; Habib argues that thrusting lowly status on some castes, such as iron smiths, carpenters, and weavers, can easily be explained by the primary desire to keep their wages low, and their low ‘purity’ score may have arisen out of this desire. Others note that Dumont conveniently ignored the individualistic and egalitarian aspects of Indian life that have coexisted all along. At times, a whole stratum of lower castes, led by egalitarian ideologies espoused by charismatic figures, has even fused into one ethnic identity. In the south, for instance, Periyar’s non-Brahmin (or Dravidian) movement coalesced around an ideology that saw Brahmins as Aryan invaders, and Dravidians as the original inhabitants of India and ancestors of all non-Brahmins. But Dumont’s theory, despite its shortcomings, still remains indispensable, an essential starting point for understanding caste.

The Persistence of Caste

In the last 2,500 years, many Indians have rejected and attacked the caste system. ‘Egalitarianism is neither alien to India nor the gift of the West,’ writes Braj Ranjan Mani. ‘Common people everywhere have a tradition of aspiring to build an egalitarian world,’ a tradition that includes the Jains, the Buddhists, and the Carvakas in ancient times; Basava and Bhakti thinkers and poets like Namdev, Janabai, Ravidas, Kabir, and Tukaram in the medieval period; Phule, Iyothee Thass, Ambedkar, and Periyar in the colonial era. But the caste system has survived them all. Others, such as Gandhi, Vivekananda, and Ram Mohan Roy, did not reject it but advocated major reform. Gandhi, in particular, naively defended the idea of caste itself, imagining it could be made free of discrimination through education and ‘upliftment’, clashing bitterly with Ambedkar, an ‘untouchable’ who wrote The Annihilation of Caste, perhaps the sharpest critique of the caste system in modern times.

Under British rule in the early 20th century, most Indian nationalists loudly debated the problem of caste and what to do about it, including the debate on what was worse: Western racism or Indian casteism. Gandhi, Lajpat Rai, Tagore, and Bose condemned the practice of untouchability while calling it not as bad as slavery in America. This came out especially in response to the question posed in 1929 by an American journalist: ‘Is the plight of the untouchable as hard as that of the Negro in America?’ No, argued most Indian leaders, citing the history of slavery, dehumanizing Jim Crow laws and the lynch mobs to make their case, but their stance was also shaped by their desire to deflate ‘superior’ westerners all too convinced of the white man’s burden. Ambedkar however argued the reverse, invoking not the de jure but the de facto position of the ‘untouchables’.[14] In juridical terms, ownership of a person, he conceded, made slavery worse than untouchability. But in practice, the slave, being property with value, gave the master an incentive to take ‘care of the health and well being of the slave’. Whereas, ‘No one is responsible for the feeding, housing and clothing of the untouchable.’ Furthermore, ‘slavery was never obligatory’, it only ‘permitted’ one to hold another as slave. ‘But untouchability is obliged,’ he wrote. A Hindu ‘is "enjoined" to hold another as untouchable’, a ‘compulsion [that the Hindu] cannot escape’. In one of his many debates with Gandhi, Ambedkar forcefully pointed out that ‘the outcaste is a byproduct of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.’ Many have asked the questions that Ambedkar begins with in this passage from The Annihilation of Caste:

Why have the mass of people tolerated the social evils to which they have been subjected? There have been social revolutions in other countries of the world. Why have there not been social revolutions in India, is a question which has incessantly troubled me. There is only one answer which I can give, and it is that the lower classes of Hindus have been completely disabled for direct action on account of this wretched Caste System. They could not bear arms, and without arms they could not rebel. They were all ploughmen—or rather, condemned to be ploughmen—and they never were allowed to convert their ploughshares into swords. They had no bayonets, and therefore everyone who chose, could and did sit upon them. On account of the Caste System, they could receive no education. They could not think out or know the way to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate. ...The existence of Caste and Caste Consciousness [also] prevented solidarity [between the oppressed castes].

In Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont wrote that ‘untouchability will not truly disappear until the purity of the Brahmin is itself radically devalued’.[15] This devaluation remains a work in progress. Or, as the scholar Gopal Guru has noted, although Indians have embraced ‘one person, one vote’, they are nowhere close to embracing the larger ideal of democracy: ‘one person, one value’ (that is, equal value at birth, irrespective of caste, class, gender, language, sexuality, religion, and more).[16] The mindset of hierarchy goes beyond caste to sustain other forms of domination and control. Whether couched as etiquette, custom, or respect, its legacy persists in a range of silences, submissions, and subordinations. For instance: wives are to obey husbands; one mustn’t question family elders; employees are to meekly follow orders; and so on. Hierarchy still has a tenacious hold on too many Indians who, in the words of the Marathi poet Govindaraj, ‘bow their heads to the kicks from above and who simultaneously give a kick below, never thinking to resist the one or refrain from the other.’[17] Omprakash Valmiki wrote in Joothan that not just among the ‘upper castes’, even Dalit social activists in Maharashtra’s Dalit bastis in the 1970s, ‘although they talked outwardly of forgetting the differences between Mahars, Mangs, Chamars and Mehtars, [they were internally] caught in the clutches of these beliefs.’ As a witness to this reality, Valmiki’s ‘heart would break. One could clearly perceive the hesitation of the [mostly Mahar] activists when they entered the Mehtar bastis’, which in turn made the Mehtars ‘suspicious of the Dalit leadership.’

The Indian Constitution of 1950, in Articles 15-17, outlawed untouchability and other forms of caste-based discrimination, proclaimed equality of opportunity in public employment, and asserted the right of the State to make special provisions ‘for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.’ From the start, the State reserved 22.5% of seats in public sector jobs, higher education, and central and state legislatures for SC/ST communities, and would later extend caste-based reservations in jobs and education to additional communities. In 1955, the Parliament also enacted The Untouchability (Offenses) Act, later called the Protection of Civil Rights Act. Given its weaknesses, it was supplanted in 1989 by a stronger hate crime legislation called the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

However, in this deeply conservative country, passing legislation is one thing, enforcing the laws and changing minds is quite another. Discrimination in housing, marriage, and employment is commonplace, even in the modern sectors of the economy. Especially outside the major cities, caste-based violence is still rife, ranging from bonded labor to rapes and murders that frequently go unpunished, not the least because casteism also abounds in the institutions of State that deal with crime and punishment. Even the Prevention of Atrocities Act, writes Teltumbde, is ‘oblivious of village dynamics’ in some ways. For instance, it’s oblivious to realities like collective punishment to members of a caste, ‘social and economic boycott and blackmail’. In recent decades, he writes, changes in the political economy of rural India have given the landowning castes ‘unprecedented wealth but failed to empower dalits to a comparable degree, thereby accentuating between the two groups the power asymmetry that is the prime mover behind atrocities.’ He attributes the post-1960s upsurge of caste violence in rural India to three factors: (1) the rise of a large, new class of shudra oppressors who have now ‘assumed the brahminical baton’ (2) ‘the relative progress’ and ‘assertiveness’ of Dalits, and (3) moral corruption, including Brahminism, in ‘the lowest rungs of the police and the bureaucracy’ that mediate ‘between the state and society’ [18] (rungs that typically also include Dalits but who, barring exceptions, often learn to mimic the dominant institutional attitudes and norms rather than defy them at great risk to themselves[19]). Unfortunately, Brahmanism also pervades the higher echelons of State administration, ensuring that this systemic problem doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s true that ‘society perpetrates atrocities against dalits,’ adds Teltumbde. ‘But when dalits approach the police with grievances against such a society, they invariably encounter an equally repugnant and hostile force.’ State governments have often used violence to repress even Dalit protest marches and calls for justice following gruesome incidents, as in Khairlanji, Maharashtra.

The broad trends, fortunately, are not without hope. A Dalit, writes feminist writer Urmila Pawar, is a ‘human being crushed under the heels of the social order dominated by the oppressive caste system, a neglected, ignored entity, yet who has stood up to resist it with a rationalist, humanist ideology.’ In recent decades, those on the lowest rungs of the social pyramid have been politicized and have made their presence felt in the Indian democracy, even commanding high political offices. Poverty and illiteracy among them, though still significantly higher than average, have declined. A few Dalits have chosen the path of militant resistance, some of principled activism, many of conversion to a different religion, others are navigating new avenues of social mobility offered by the modern economy, at times through reservations in public jobs and education. A few have even chosen art and literature to tell their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. Dalit literature, explains author Sharankumar Limbale, is ‘writing about Dalits by Dalit writers with a Dalit consciousness’. It has added ‘to Indian literature fresh experiences, a new sensitivity and vocabulary, a different protagonist, an alternate vision, and a new chemistry of suffering and revolt.’[20]. To novelist, feminist, and politician, P. Sivakami, Dalit literature is the ‘rebellious expression of a new awakening among educated Dalits.’[21] Dalit creativity, wrote the scholar DR Nagaraj (1954-1998), ‘is marked by specific forms of contestation; it challenges the hegemonic modes of segregation [of works into, say, folk and classical, and other ‘hierarchized opposites’]. It also celebrates the capacity of the human mind to uphold the essential spiritual dignity of being.’[22]

Last but not the least, a new breed of scholars is contesting the dominant historical, cultural, and religious narratives of India, including those forged in recent centuries by a convenient collusion of the power and knowledge of Europeans and Brahmins. These scholars include Ambedkar in his large and lucid body of work, Kancha Ilaiah, author of Why I Am Not a Hindu, DR Nagaraj, author of The Flaming Feet and Other Essays, Gail Omvedt, author of Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals, Gopal Guru, author of Humiliation: Claims and Context, Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste, Braj Ranjan Mani, author of Debrahmanizing History: Dominance and Resistance in Indian Society, and many others.

More than ever, Dalits now understand that ‘Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.’[23] But as Sivakami has written, the ‘relative silence on the part of non-Dalits on issues of caste amounts to an assumption that confronting casteism and untouchability is the sole responsibility of Dalits, just as it was assumed that confronting gender inequalities was the job of feminists.’ As Teltumbde points out, ‘Castes cannot be annihilated by Dalits alone for the simple fact that they have not created it. Unless the larger society owned up to this task, castes will not be annihilated.’[24]

_______________________

Notes:

1. John Keay, India: A History, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000, p 54.
2. Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India, pp 62-68.
3. Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Essays, Rupa; From essay titled Race Conflict, p 343.
4. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, BR Ambedkar analyzed various historical and religious texts and concluded: “We can, therefore, say with some confidence that Untouchability was born some time about 400 A.D.”
5. R.S. Sharma, Rethinking India’s Past, p 7.
6. Indu Bharti, Dalits Gain New Izzat, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25, Issue No. 18-19, 05 May 1990.
7. Uma Chakravarti, Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas of ‘Ancient’ India, Tulika Books, 2006; from the chapter titled Conceptualizing Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India, p 140.
8. Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology, Three Essays Collective, 2012.
9. Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India: from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge, p 25.
10. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind, Permanent Black, 2001, pp.  58, 45, 41.
11. Anand Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, Zed Books, 2010, pp. 20-22, 31, 48, 50.
12. Christophe Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, Hurst & Company, 2011, p 487, 413.
13. Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist perception, Tulika Books, 1995.
14. Slate, Nico, Race, Caste, and Nation: Indian Nationalists and the American Negro, 1893-1947, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Oct 12, 2006
15. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, p. 54.
16. Gopal Guru, "Dalit critique of Liberal Democracy", YouTube, Mar 1, 2012.
17. Quoted in Sudhir and Katharina Kakar’s The Indians: Portrait of a People, Penguin Viking, 2007, p 27.
18. Teltumbde, in The Persistence of Caste, also argues, less than persuasively I think, that the rise in atrocities against Dalits is significantly caused by neoliberal globalization that began in the 1990s. It’s less than persuasive because the impact of neoliberal globalization has been strongest in urban India and relatively weak in rural India, the site of most atrocities. More likely, as Christophe Jaffrelot as argued, the atrocities are a dominant caste reaction to the greater Dalit assertion in rural India following the rise of Dalit politics and the Bahujan Samaj Party in the early 1990s.
19. In his memoir, An Untouchable in the I.A.S., Balwant Singh documented this sort of social reality in the administrative ranks in the 1960s, but which no doubt continues; reported by Gyanendra Pandey in A History of Prejudice (p. 69). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. Balwant Singh wrote, “For officers from the low castes things were… complicated. They were acceptable if they accepted the prevailing… social norms.” Pandey adds, “Balwant Singh might have made the point more strongly still, for it is probably fair to say that such officers were tolerated if they accepted upper-caste ways and attitudes and yet [were] never fully accepted as social peers. Low-caste officers suffered from much social indignity and humiliation. Expressions of grievance on their part were commonly met with the response that these were ‘trivial,’ ‘inconsequential’ matters.”
20. Sharankumar Limbale, “Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature”, Orient Longman, 2004, p19, 37. The Marathi original of 1996 was translated into English by Alok Mukherjee.
21. P. Sivakami, Tamil Dalit Literature - Some Riddles, Cross / Cultures, No. 145, Jan 1, 2012.
22. Nagaraj, D.R. (2013-05-15). The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India (Kindle Locations 2791-2793). Permanent Black. Kindle Edition.
23. Quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.
24. Anand Teltumbde, “To the Self-Obsessed Marxists And The Pseudo Ambedkarites,” Sanhati.com, 2 April 2013.

All paintings are by Savi Sawarkar (source).

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NB: This article has had multiple edits after its first appearance.

More writing by Namit Arora?
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Comments

[Vishal]

Further reading regarding inter-caste marriages in India: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100219/FOREIGN/702189856/1103

[yayaver]

This article was quite helpful in understanding of the developement of caste system in India. Thank you Namit sir..

[Anonymous]

I would like to tell you that while your article is excellent in summing up the facts on Indian society from the pre-Aryan times till now using the analysis of Modern Western Scholars on Sociology, History, Economics, etc., it lacks in a treatment of Indian thought from ancient times on issues like division in the society apart from the thought of Hindu lawmaker's and authors of the Epics and Puranas. Indian Philosophy emerged with the Upanishads where moorings on caste and gender equality can be seen, and then the two non-Hindu religio-philosophical schools (Buddhism and Jainism) which emerged took these issues more seriously and started practising their ideals of equality in real life. (The Carvaka school’s literature is too scanty, being only available from their mutilated representations in Hindu and Buddhist works, to tell on the social views of this school apart from some guesses we can make on implications of the schools views on metaphysics and epistemology.) The history of India from roughly the fifth century B.C.E. to roughly the seventh or the eighth century C.E. is one of constant interaction (often peaceful) of ideas between orthodox and liberal minded people and there is enough reason to assume that things were far volatile then in the society with regards to caste and gender discriminations than in the mediaeval and colonial times. I believe modern Western sociologists and historians often tend to ignore this interaction part of Ancient Indian Intellectual History. Whatever conclusions they have come to (starting from colonial times) on our contemporary society is absolutely correct or largely correct, but if they need to write on the history of caste-related thought in India, they need to study deeply the philosophy and social thought related to Buddhism, Jainism, the period of Hinduism known as counter-reformation (products of which among others has Mahabharata which has extant talks on social issues and contains heterogeneous and often mutually contradictory views on matters related to social equality, but most often has debates penetrating deep into the matter but concluding in a slightly orthodox-tilted answer to a social issue). Honestly, the door which was opened by William Jones for the East and which enabled the World to get the writings of Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Max Muller, Romain Rolland, etc. was often made closed by some biased misinformed opinions of Euro-centric thinkers and you see a continuous misinterpretation of Indian thought in both the Continental school members like Hegel and Marx and Anglo-American Analytical school members like Russell. Amartya Sen's book "The Argumentative Indian" has tried to present (though somewhat superficially) this forgotten rational side of the History of India. It was a sad turn of history which ousted the dominant anti-caste religion of India, Buddhism, from India which allowed Hindu orthodoxy to run unchecked and liberal thoughts arising within the Hindu fold failed to be assertive enough except for the short span of a century in North India and Bengal when the Bhakti movement (aligned with the Islamic Sufi movement) brought some relief from extreme oppression. As someone belonging to the elite class of India, you have made yourself fully acquainted with Modern Ideas and then your conscience is making you think on India's miserable discrimination, and naturally to be critical of it. But why don't you think that your kind of conscience and your exposure to liberal thought (or at least some kind of liberal thought) was to be found in at least some of your forefathers and what we see today in the Indian society may not have accumulated straight from the time that the Aryans came to India but maybe from a much later period (possibly two thousand and a few hundred years after arrival of the Aryans to India). It is an irony that the land which showed maximum discrimination in the society in the whole world produced people for the first time in whole history of Humankind who thought of others (including subhuman creatures) as nothing but an extension of one’s self. Why I say this in connection with an article designed to bring awareness amongst modern Indian elites on discrimination existing in the Indian society in the most cruel form is that the elites of India can be more easily made liberal by showing to them the thoughts of the most liberal among their own forefathers than by mere criticism of a modern Indian or a modern Westerner who these elites may feel to belong to the 'opposite camp'. While you think that Rammohan Roy, Tagore and Gandhi did not completely criticize caste but wanted to make the best reformations possible within the existing framework, in reality they did decry on caste and at least Tagore was greatly in favour of total rejection of caste but these three people all believed in a cure of problems from within our minds and not in bloody revolutions. When we (whether a member of the class of elites or a member of the class of non-elites) criticize the dominant elites' attitude, don't you think our criticism should also include and stress on the sayings of these liberal forefathers of the Indian elites and show that they are falling short of their worthy forefathers? If someone thinks all the Hindu philosophers and authors of the epics and Puranas to be intellectually dishonest for not rejecting age-old orthodoxy right away, at least we should speak of Buddha, Mahavira, and many Buddhist, Jain thinkers and Bhakti-Sufi practitioners so that an elite Indian need not feel that eye-opening has to happen only by getting schooled in Modern (and albeit Western) ideology.

Finally, two words on your statements on IIT graduates and engineers from elite classes and on reservation. When you say that the notion of excellence in education of techies and MBAs completely ignore knowledge in the Arts and Social Sciences (in which I agree completely with you, but would like to add the Fundamental Sciences and Natural Philosophy also just in light of what is happening today), do you also agree that today's researchers on Social Sciences also ignore what was called Arts and which was often elitist in thought (though not elitist in social views)? In other words, do you recognize that today's Social Scientists may also be lacking in talent compared to giant thinkers of the periods from the Enlightenment to the Early/Mid Twentieth Century, that they also may be somehow lacking an overall view of the entire human society which is essential to give a call to one section of the society for the betterment of another? Finally, while you are absolutely correct about the plight of the lower caste people in the rural areas (who may be rightly called by the strong word 'dalits'), don't you see that many of these lower caste people in urban and semi-urban areas who have been made 'aware' by politicians have started to show enmity to everyone from the elite class irrespective of his or her personal inclination towards the liberal or the conservative views on social equality, and while this is natural, it is not healthy and it also needs to be tackled and ignoring this would be equally dangerous? Also, you need to make a note that many of the urban scheduled caste members who are taking the privilege of the reservation system have been liberated one or two generation back and as such needs no more help. As long as we discuss about these pitfalls of human misuse of the reservation system and suggest remedies to that, we cannot claim loudly that reservation is nothing but a means to remove some age-old evils of our society. Also we need to note that many of these now educated and privileged urban scheduled caste members show the same attitude towards the uneducated and under-privileged rural scheduled caste members as is to be seen in the upper caste people. The factor of misuse of the reservation system is still, by large, minor compared to the gross miseries still arising from caste discrimination, but still we cannot ignore this factor when we give a message to the elites to say that their view of reservation and its need should be informed.

I say all this to tell you that in reality, I see now that the Indian society is getting polarized into a uncannily orthodox, irrational section consisting of the 'elite's and another section extremely critical of the former which consists of the enlightened members of the lower classes and few elites who want to mark themselves as conscientious and are not afraid to be labelled as radical. We must realize that whether things continue in this way for eternity or a war is waged between these two opposing classes, the best thing to happen is to really have a softening of the minds of each and everyone amongst us and finally to see reality in a truly knowledgeable way or at least to act with kindness.

[Namit]

Anonymous,

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I don't disagree with much of what you say. I will try to respond to a couple of points you have raised. In your first paragraph, I think your central argument can be captured by this sentence:

When we (whether a member of the class of elites or a member of the class of non-elites) criticize the dominant elites' attitude, don't you think our criticism should also include and stress on the sayings of these liberal forefathers of the Indian elites and show that they are falling short of their worthy forefathers?

I agree and have written elsewhere that the best kind of social change is the one that uses internal resources, familiar cultural exemplars, and appeals to one's own higher cultural ideals. I think Ambedkar did this well with his emphasis on the ideal of equality in Buddhism and his own conversion to it. But this becomes more challenging if the dominant elites have no interest in so many of the ancient Indian exemplars you mention. Do they care much for Mahavira and the Bhakti poets anymore? So while, as you suggest, this strategy should be used whenever possible, we have to acknowledge its limits, and mix it up with the best new exemplars, inspirations, and strategies drawn from today's world. I suspect you see it the same way.

On your second para, I have written about reservations elsewhere (here and here) and don't have much new to add right now. I think we have to begin any debate on reservations by temporarily separating the idea of reservations from its current practice. We have to first figure out if it makes sense, why, and how much (I like Jayati Ghosh on this). Once we know our common ground, we can talk about implementation, such that the abuses and corruption are minimized and the beneficiaries are not just the relatively privileged members of the lower castes (the creamy layer clause already exists). I also think that speaking of reservations as a benefit for the lower castes alone is less than helpful. These are our fellow citizens, and when they benefit, we benefit too. It is no less a policy designed to benefit the upper castes, and helps them become part of a more inclusive society. I doubt that this view is about to become wildly popular though!

Also we need to note that many of these now educated and privileged urban scheduled caste members show the same attitude towards the uneducated and under-privileged rural scheduled caste members as is to be seen in the upper caste people.

It is well known that hierarchy persists in the mind up and down the chain in India. There is always someone beneath you. This parallels the experience of African-Americans, who too discriminated based on skin color among themselves. The goal of reservations is not to make enlightened thinkers, but to make more equitable a society's access to its rewards and privileges. In parallel, we have to target the value system that supports hierarchy in the mind, whether among the upper or lower castes. However, the upper castes have fewer excuses for holding on to that idea, and I personally prefer to focus on them. That said, as I wrote in one of the linked articles above,

... it is very important that Indians see reservations as only one in a bag of tricks to achieve greater social and economic equality. The stubborn persistence of inequalities that derive from illiteracy, hunger and malnutrition, lack of healthcare and sanitation, uneven economic development, and lax law enforcement suggests that India is nowhere close to realizing Ambedkar’s inspiring vision of democracy.

In your last para, the polarization you mention rings true. I too wish the "softening of the minds" and kindness would happen somehow on both sides. But you'll agree that we are in no position to advocate patience and perseverance to those who have suffered for so long. Raising a ruckus is sometimes helpful to get noticed. Few pernicious ideas can be defeated without a bitter fight.

[Anonymous]

Namit,

In human history, not negligible in number were people who wished to argue for the sake of argument even when their topic of argument was something pertaining to human morality or other issues connected to the human society and not metaphysics or epistemology. These people were justly criticized. While I have a conscious desire not to indulge in the pleasure of arguing and try to guard myself from retorting to each and every statement I find disagreeable, I feel that this time I need to say something about some of your comments.

You said that Ambedkar spoke of Buddha and himself converted to Buddhism. Honestly, I have very little knowledge about Ambedkar. But one basic difference I have noticed between social activists of modern time and Buddha or Mahavira is that for the latter two, there was a search for some metaphysical truth which brings liberation of our mind and preaching that truth and the path to attain it to people. Now the path which they found and preached entailed non-discrimination and therefore they preached that also and saw that all the disciples follow the same. In their case, they were awakened by their own misery which was not due to the cause of any social injustice which they had been facing but due to the realization of the common fate of death which at one time or another any human being irrespective of his or her social position has to face. Once afflicted by this misery, Buddha is said to have noticed other kinds of misery on leaving his regal home like the miseries of poor farmers who he felt were exploited (an easy source of this information is Asvaghosa's Buddhacarita if you would not want to read Buddha's life from the Pali cannon). On the other hand, the social activists of modern times often have an origin for their thought in Enlightenment Period Social Philosophers Russeau and Voltaire and their followers in the Nineteenth centuries. While the best thinkers of the Enlightenment period who dealt not only with Social and Moral Philosophy but also with Metaphysics and Epistemology came to the conclusion that agnosticism would be the best stance a rational being would choose, many others felt no need for any metaphysical and epistemological explorations at all and they decided that desire is normal and therefore equality should be imposed on the society externally. This is a great deviation from Buddha and Mahavira, though not from Charvaka. I would say Gandhi on the other hand when he praised the Bhakti and Sufi movement leaders did it much more with a true appreciation for what these people stood for. But as you have rightly pointed out, Gandhi also was not fully aware that these Bhakti leaders' way is not suitable for modern world and he had failed to realize that when post- Industrial Revolution ways gets established in a country where the essence of spiritualism was already almost lost in the ill-doings of a hierarchical society, the same hierarchy gets so much deeply entrenched that only attempting to go back to our spiritual purity and preaching that to everyone may not work very effectively. But that does not mean that modernity for Indians (and Asians at large) would have to necessarily exclude even the best part of the prevalent thoughts of our ancient times.

I would say with some hesitation that post-Tagore I do not see a single person who can help us combine our pre-modern values with contemporary Western values without any contradiction and I myself go through a lot of struggle in this process of modernization without any guidance and feel I am losing something in the process of gaining something else not because it is inevitable but just because of my sheer inability to see how to keep both at the same time. This arises from the fact that Tagore and most of his lofty contemporaries had not seen through the end of the Second World War and the post-War developments and though they had seen the First World War and post-war movements like Dadaism or Nazism or Fascism (sorry to utter the last two with the first one but I think the complexity of the first is connected to the complexity which gave rise to the last two), typical reactions (in different directions) of the turbulent twentieth century, they had not been able to fully overcome the trauma and say something which would help us understand all the post-Second World War developments. The transition from the time of Immanuel Kant to a division of the Anglo-American Analytical and the Continental Schools of Philosophy (the first coupled with Science and virtually divorced from the Arts and the latter its opposite) shows a great human tragedy where Science, Mathematics, Logic, Epistemology got completely dissociated from fields which would discuss on subtleties of our feelings (anubhuti) and ideas of social justice. In India, the situation is worse since there is no one like Russell or Bergman in our country to whose call the whole nation or a very large section of it responds to like they did in case of Gandhi. (I cannot say that Satyajit Ray reached even a tenth of the Bengali population, leave aside the Indian population.) In such a situation, while we may feel a very strong need to 'focus' on certain issues because some things have been wrong for 'so long', we should also not forget the less immediate but the true goal and remember even if we achieve something by hitting the powerful yet blind people, it is perhaps our failure that we could not find a better way of enlightening them instead of hitting them.

With regards to your words that enlightening the lower castes would enrich the upper castes also, I would agree completely. But by enlightenment I do not understand just the ability to study applied science and technology and get good jobs and gain thereby an apparently coveted lifestyle. And while I see that a class has suffered so long and further delay in their emancipation would be a great threat, I feel a greater threat would be awaiting entire mankind if the excessive specialization of our minds (I am talking of the numerous office goers all over the world) to allow us to do our specific jobs more effectively and the great degradation of our tastes cannot be reversed. In other words, I believe that if all the oppressed persons of today become like today’s privileged people so that the World has none who is oppressed, if everyone would become specialized in some field of applied science or technology (whether engineering or biotechnology or medicinal technology or management science or something else), and their culture would remain the mechanical one as it has become now, then the World would perhaps be a place that would be worse than the Eighteenth Century World where hierarchy was a bitter reality but at least few people had imagination and thought and something which can be called culture. I think once one starts hating the mechanical life which has become the norm from the late twentieth century, slowly one regains his or her real self and then naturally becomes eager to remove social discriminations also.

Having said all this, I would like to confess that I am a very indecisive person and sometimes I think that my mental process of attaching values to certain ideas (like, ‘fights should be best fought internally, not externally’ or ‘Being mechanical is even worse than being vicious’ ) is perhaps coming from self-love or something very subjective and not due to my respect for objectivity and reason and therefore I would someday face a situation stressing the need for reevaluation of these ideas. If you would still feel that your discussion with me has made you think again on something, even if that thing is of very little significance, I would be happy.